Professor Dr Gabriele Hegerl

Research Priorities: Geosciences, climate changes, extreme weather events, human influence on climate change, climate sensitivity
Gabriele Hegerl is a German climatologist and geoscientist. She investigates changes in the climate and the human influence on the climate system. In her work she identifies and quantifies the human contribution to climate change. She served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for several years and has contributed to the status reports in leading positions.
Based on data, models, and analyses, Gabriele Hegerl investigates the worldwide climate change. She analyses extreme weather events and determines the extend of their connection to climate change. For this, she considers the influence of numerous factors such as green house gases, volcanic eruptions, and solar radiation. She investigated how the global temperature reacts to a change in these factors with the help of energy balance models, complex climate models, and palaeo-proxy-data.
With her reconstructions, she concluded that that many of the climatic fluctuations in the last millennia can be explained by external events such as changes in the frequency of volcanic eruptions She led studies on climate sensitivity and her work helped to identify and quantify the anthropogenic climate change. The data she collected and the models she built serve in the assessment of future climate change events.